Key to the momentum that propelled the 70-year-old women’s suffrage campaign to victory was the support this “despised” cause attracted from members of New York City’s media establishment, both in their public behavior and in the pages of the mainstream publications they wrote for or controlled. Trolls on the parade line took aim at their masculinity, but what today might be called their “liberal media bias” passed without apparent notice. In the 1910s, editorial dispassion as a value was not quite yet a thing.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as women grit their teeth and tirelessly fought for the right to vote amidst sneers and insults hurled at them by men and even members of their own sex, suffragists in New York found an unlikely and powerful ally: the big, crude Tammany boss Timothy Daniel Sullivan.

As a queer historian, a frustrating amount of my research comes from records of arrests. Sodomy, prostitution, disorderly conduct, masquerading, vagrancy, the crime against nature, solicitation – the list of laws that have been used in New York City to criminalize queer lives is long, varied, and stretches all the way back to 1634, when a Dutch colonial anti-sodomy law was used to prosecute a settler named Harmen van den Bogaert and an enslaved African man called Tobias.

I say frustrating because these arrests rarely say much to the historian interested in queer life: a name, a date, a charge; perhaps if you’re lucky you can find a newspaper squib that gives a line or two of context. Often, they are indicia in the truest sense, pointing towards something but not revealing much of anything (other than the existence of the state apparatus of criminalization). But in times where there was little public discussion of queer lives, records of arrests are some of the few regularly discoverable signposts pointing to where queerness may have existed.

By Stephen PetrusThe Collection of Queens City Councilman Daniel Dromm, recently accessioned at the La Guardia and Wagner Archives, will benefit scholars, activists, curators, and policymakers researching LGBTQ studies and recent New York City history in general. Dromm, a Queens public school teacher from 1984 to 2009, was a founder of the Queens Lesbian and Gay Pride Committee and an organizer of the Queens Pride Parade and Festival, inaugurated in Jackson Heights in 1993. Elected to New York City Council in 2009, he represents Jackson Heights and Elmhurst in Queens and is one of two openly gay City Council members from the borough.

​The Dromm Collection consists of 24 boxes of documents, 30 multimedia videos, 160 artifacts, and some 3,000 photographs. The bulk ranges from 1990 to the early 2010s. It’s particularly strong on the origins and development of the Queens Pride Parade, containing photographs, correspondence, flyers, pamphlets, permits, registration material, and meeting notes. Artifacts include pins, Frisbees, clothing patches, and T-shirts.

By Jason SokolHillary Clinton is not the first woman to attempt to shatter the highest glass ceiling. Perhaps her ascent will establish for some of her forerunners a more prominent place in American political history. Ellen Fitzpatrick’s recent book, The Highest Glass Ceiling, focuses on three such forerunners: Victoria Woodhull, Margaret Chase Smith, and Shirley Chisholm. Chisholm ran for president in 1972, not only a pioneering female candidate, but also the first African American to mount a full-fledged national campaign for the presidency.​

Since 1964 the story of Kitty Genovese has shaped our expectations of community. It has served as a powerful cautionary tale, especially but not exclusively for women, at a time when new possibilities for independence and involvement drew many young people to big cities. Specifically, it was deployed to alert New Yorkers to a problem that did not exist: that of apathy. Activism was in the air and on the streets in 1964, and many New Yorkers joined local, national, and international organizing campaigns. Far from being apathetic, they gave their time and money as individuals to build groups and campaigns that could press their demands for reform and revolution. ​​The infamous phrase “I didn’t want to get involved” was quoted in a front-page New York Times report in March 1964 that blamed the killing of Kitty Genovese on more than three dozen people—thirty-eight witnesses to a heinous crime. Her neighbors were castigated for a failure of personal and collective responsibility. Almost immediately, the story of a young woman’s death became a warning of the growing “sickness” of apathy. The media promoted an epidemic of indifference at the precise moment when millions of Americans were organizing for social change. The myth that resulted is at the heart of the paradoxical story of Kitty Genovese.

​In 1704, Sarah Kemble Knight took a journey from Boston to New Haven, traveling over 400 hundred miles on horseback, over five months, roundtrip, to conduct a little family business in place of her husband, who was indisposed at the time. In her journal, written for the entertainment of family and friends, Knight, acting as deputy husband,[1] talked about conditions on the road, the fear she experienced as a woman,[2] and the people she encountered on the periphery of Boston and New York, then one of the major cities in the colonies.

Benjamin Franklin Stevens, "Facsimile of the Unpublished British Headquarters Coloured Manuscript Map of New York and Environs 1782. Reproduced from the Original Drawing in the War Office London" (1782).

By Lindsay M. Keiter

I encountered the Morris clan purely by coincidence. It was my first visit to the South Carolina Historical Society –- (they were still in the Fireproof Building then) –- and I was disappointed to find that the collections I identified for research yielded little. An archivist suggested that, since I was looking for extensive correspondence between married couples, that I look at the Vanderhorst (pronounced VAN-dross) Family Papers. As I gingerly leafed through pages in various degrees of decay from long-ago water damage and long-dead silverfish, a surprising postal marking kept appearing: Morrisania, Harlem, New York. As my research unfolded, the Morrises continually resurfaced, a testament to the tenacity of family ties and the flexibility of “Northern” and “Southern” identities from the American Revolution through the Civil War. The Morris-Vanderhorst connections are a fascinating example of how families were knit together by marriage, affection, and property despite individuals’ personal and political identification with New York or South Carolina as the United States fractured along regional lines.

The art collector Peggy Guggenheim had just opened her avant-garde "Art of This Century" gallery on West 57 Street in the fall of 1942 when her friend Marcel Duchamp suggested that she mount an all-woman exhibition. Guggenheim loved the idea: the show would be radical not only because of its composition but because most of the paintings, drawings, and sculptures on view would be either abstract or Surrealist in style, as befitted Guggenheim's modernist taste.

In 1969, Mobilization for Youth (MFY) social worker Jan Peterson left the Lower East Side for Williamsburg, Brooklyn, heeding a challenge posed by Congress of Racial Equality leader Marshall England: to organize in a white neighborhood. Peterson’s trajectory after MFY captures much of the effervescent rise of social movements in the seventies, as well as the many tensions and contradictions building within the movements themselves and in American politics more broadly. Inspired by the example of the African American civil rights movement and the promise of the War on Poverty, many grassroots activists organized Community Action Programs (CAPs) with the goal of both improving the immediate material circumstances of their members and creating a mechanism for their voices to be heard and taken seriously in policymaking. While the 1970s are often remembered as a decade of racial and ethnic polarization, in many cases CAPs and their successors drew participants together in interracial efforts….[1]